Typical parenting practices

[TW for child abuse and Bob McCoskrie]

… now apparently include tying a child to your wrist and washing his or her mouth out with soap.

Thus speaketh Bob McCoskrie, defender of families if by “families” we mean “the right of men to use violence to control their partners and children”. [ETA: updated link because Stuff doesn’t believe in archiving]

The lesson to take home from here? This is why we do not fucking compromise. We do not fucking say “this law is wrong and we will repeal it, full stop”, and when faced with a barrage of patriarchal and religious fundamentalist abuse, say “okay then, let’s make it a bit softer so the mainstream [who have been convinced by fucking liars like Bob McCoskrie] think it’s okay.”

Because all you get is a law under which this shit continues to fucking happen.

Just to round out the fuckwittery, Bob added this to a media release exported directly from his basement:

Family First NZ* says that parenting is being put on trial as a result of the anti-smacking law, and that it is being used as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in custody battles

Ignoring the really shitty grammar which seems to imply that parenting is the WMD … what the fuck.

Bob, this may come as a surprise to you since your entire life is focused on your own navel and complaining that bitches need to get back in the kitchen and kids need to be seen and not heard … but WMDs are fucking awful things with a capacity to kill and maim millions of people.

Not, in fact, in any way comparable to “shit that your ex might bring up in a custody battle”.

And frankly, if I had an ex who had forcibly shaved my child’s head as a punishment (there are absolutely no bad connotations there at all) and washed his mouth out with soap you fucking bet I would raise that shit in a custody case.

… And since the parent was fucking acquitted anyway, why the fuck are YOU complaining?

Oh, right. Because this has never actually been about ensuring that actual child abuse get investigated properly. It’s about investigating child abuse except when the parents doling it out are good, white, middle-class people who sometimes like to punch their kids in the face, in which case the police and CYF should just assume that nothing could have happened because to even check that shit out is a horrific abuse of power or something.

Have no spoons for reading the links but I will say that in my experience the people who are most vocal about the rights of nice white middle-class people to totally not abuse their kids in the privacy of their own homes (parents’ rights!!1!), well they are usually abusers themselves. They just don’t think they are because it doesn’t count unless you half-kill your child with regularity and/or you’re Maori, Pacific Islander, or one of Those Immigrants.

Exactly. It’s just “firm discipline” if you’re the right kind of people, whereas if you’re poor and brown just having a kid in the first place is probably abusive. Cf. “natural frustration” vs. “murder” when it’s a rich white dude stabbing a brown kid with a spraycan.

Ignoring the really shitty grammar which seems to imply that parenting is the WMD … what the fuck.

Umm, that’s what it implies because that’s what he means right; that the totally sweet as parenting is being dragged out in bloody court and used against them as if there was something wrong with it when there bloody well isn’t because jesus that’s why and there is nothing you can do about it because gramsci and bitches and activist PC goon mud, just like god made viruses to thin out their numbers and bastard commies and brown people went and turned them evil by puttin them into bombs.